It has been a nice sunny day but a cold raw wind this morning. I got twenty three eggs from the white chickens alone to-day.

Friday April 24th

After we did up the chores this morning Huby and I went back with some old rags and a bottle of crude oil to make torches to burn of the blue grass field. It was just the day for the job with a little east wind and when we set fire at the east end of the field it swept over the whole area in no time. It burned quite a few of the fence posts and the first thing we knew it was in the wood. It was not burning fast in there but was spreading steadily Huby said we would have a very hard job putting it out and we might better let it go as it would be a good thing to clean the ground up and was not hot enough to hurt the little trees. He didn't think it would burn far any way so we took a walk over to McQueens in quest of the lost turkey hen, we found Charlie at the black smith trade shoeing a team for Phil {Shaver?} and the old man outside. As John Henry Butler is about dead and Ralph Waddle is sick Charlie picks up quite a lot of business. Coming home Huby and I separated and looked both sides of McQueens gully and through Preston's wood. We had Bluch and he put up a rabbit but we saw no sign of the turkey but just as we were about home coming along the top of Ivey's gully Bluch scared her up, we didn't find her nest but left her back there. It was nearly noon when we got to our gully and we thought of coming up to dinner but on second thought we decided to see how the fire in the wood was progressing. The blue grass field was black all over but the wood was full of smoke and after we got in a little way we found Dad. who had seen the fire in the wood and come back and had been fighting to keep it away from Evan's fence. It had got pretty well all through the wood but hadn't got to the fence yet, we all three fought for an hour or so and at last got it about stamped out of course there were stumps on fire. I was by myself most of the time and Huby and Dad had an awful time trying to keep it away from a few panels of rail fence between us and John Wess but about one or after we thought it was safe to leave till after dinner, then Huby and I went back again. We found it all out through the wood except a few stumps but it had started up at the fence again and completely destroyed it for a fence as the rails in two panels were nearly burned up and we had to tear them down and throw them on to the burnt territory. It had also started in the grass on the other side again and if we had been a few minutes later it would have been into Evan's wood and we would have had our morning's fun repeated. We were back there all the after noon trimming